The War on Drugs – now in its sixth decade – grinds on, with little danger of peace breaking out. Wastewater testing indicates methamphetamine use in New Zealand is at unprecedented highs. There are record drug seizures at the border.
A report in March from a ministerial advisory group on transnational, serious and organised crime says Customs intercepted 55kg of meth in the 2013/14 financial year. By 2023/24, they were stopping an average of 92kg of meth per week.
The 2023 seizure in Auckland of a record 713kg of methamphetamine concealed in maple syrup, intended for Australasian distribution, led to last week’s sentencing of a New Zealander living in Melbourne.
Prices have never been lower, indicating vast quantities of the drug are making it through customs and flooding the market. Supply creates its own demand: more meth and lower prices mean dabblers become habitual users, with consequences for their physical and mental health, their families and communities and the already unravelling fabric of the nation.
Recent years have seen the radical transformation of New Zealand’s drug economy. In 2011, the Key government reclassified pseudoephedrine as a controlled substance in response to a sequence of ram raids on chemists and a general desire to get tough on drugs after an allegedly lax Labour term of government. The gangs responded by importing meth, connecting New Zealand’s loose network of tinny houses and clan labs with transnational criminal organisations.
Our steadily increasing trade volume made us an easier target for smuggling.
In 2014, Australia introduced its 501 deportation policy – its architect was then immigration minister Peter Dutton – which led to the repatriation of more than 3000 convicted criminals back to New Zealand, many of them members of the Comancheros and Nomads gangs, who’ve fully integrated New Zealand with the global drug market.
Slick operatives
The transnational organisations operate sophisticated and diverse supply chains and supplement their drug revenue with money-laundering, human trafficking and online fraud, cheerfully facilitated by social media platforms.
The resources available to police and Customs to respond are woefully inadequate. The government has spent the first half of its term preoccupied with gang insignias, citizens’ arrests, boot camps and other cosmetic measures. Its predecessor, the Ardern administration, was preoccupied with social equity, culturally informed “policing by consent”, reducing the prison population and – infamously – funding the Mongrel Mob to deliver drug rehabilitation programmes.
Neither major party seems especially troubled by the expansion of violent, ruthless and highly professional criminal groups into the country.
The report of the ministerial advisory group found public-sector responses to organised crime are undermined by the standard problems that plague every government initiative: agencies do not work well together (with the exception of police and customs); they do not share information; performance targets are vague and disconnected from broader policy goals; there’s little or no accountability.
National’s law and order platform is about recruiting more police (though it’s unlikely to reach even its modest goal of 500), stronger sentences, more Corrections officers and lifting the number of prison beds.
Incarceration costs the taxpayer an average of $200,000 per person per annum. Merely filling the 810 additional beds at Waikeria Prison will add $162 million to the Corrections budget – currently $2.2 billion a year and climbing quickly.
There is always hope that exciting new recovery and rehabilitation programmes will reduce this fiscal pressure, but reimprisonment and resentencing rates have barely shifted in 10 years. Recent studies in the US justice system cast grave doubt on the efficacy of rehabilitation schemes: it’s hard to find statistically meaningful evidence of any programmes succeeding at scale. In Corrections’ most recent annual report, the agency admitted its interventions don’t show any statistical significance, plaintively insisting this doesn’t mean they’re not working.
Health focus
The alternative method to reducing drug harm has always been a health-based approach. Treatment schemes are cheaper than prisons. There’s a growing body of evidence indicating many meth addicts have some form of neurodiversity – often ADHD, suggesting meth is a form of self-medication.
Several studies, the most recent from Australia last December, have found prescription ADHD medications are an effective treatment for some addicts.
Policy experts in this area love health-based solutions because they destroy the market for organised crime syndicates. But most politicians dismiss this approach: using taxpayer money to provide drugs for addicts makes them look profligate, weak, soft on crime.
There’s little funding for addiction treatment in New Zealand. If you present yourself at a hospital or police station and explain that you have a meth abuse problem and need help, you’re unlikely to receive much care or support – unless you commit a serious crime and get referred to a programme as part of sentencing.
Labour did establish some programmes, supporting them via proceeds of crime, but the money was then diverted to build bollards to protect small businesses from ram raids. The current government has indicated it will direct this funding stream back towards treatment again.
New Zealand is well positioned to employ a more sophisticated strategy of fighting transnational organised crime by disrupting the market. We are small and remote, and these entities operate via local franchises while offshoring most of the profit.
Attacking the cashflows and financial resources will cause the local businesses to fail – just like any other sector – and seek more lucrative markets elsewhere.
But this would require a shift away from both right-wing posturing about getting tough and left-wing bromides about cultural equity before our politicians can reckon with the daunting new reality of drugs and crime in New Zealand.
